Here’s why net neutrality matters. It doesn’t just hurt the home user watching Netflix. It also hurts businesses that just so happen to share the Internet pipeline with Netflix. So when Comcast, Verizon or other cable providers interfere with Netflix bandwidth, they also screw businesses like NEPC of Boston.

Cogent has assembled its network by leasing segments of fiber across the country and it aggressively charges less in order to gain more customers; it connects to 1400 office buildings and would like to have more data centers on its list. NEPC’s problem was that it had bought the first flavor of service from Cogent: NEPC is one of many professional services firms (legal, financial, advertising, consulting) located in multi-tenant office buildings that use Cogent for Internet access.

But Cogent was being systematically disfavored by Verizon, Comcast, and the other providers because of its sale of the second flavor of service — transit — to bandwidth-intensive Netflix. Both flavors of services look the same from the perspective of a fiber network; they’re just packets flowing over Cogent’s leased or owned facilities. When the Cogent transit network seeks to interconnect with the Comcast or Verizon eyeball network to hand off packets, things can evidently go wrong. NEPC’s communications cataclysm was a byproduct of the battle between eyeball and transit networks. In order to make life miserable for Netflix and force that company to share its revenue with the eyeball networks, Comcast and the others had simultaneously made life miserable for many other companies.

Comcast’s response: this is business as usual.

A non-profit research corporation, M-Labs, after a careful longitudinal analysis of web traffic, has found the smoking gun. There is no denying that Comcast, Verizon and the other big media/Internet providers are choking bandwidth in their own self-interests. And, as the quote above shows, they could care less if consumers and smaller corporations get screwed in the process.

The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users’ private Web communications from eavesdropping.

But an increasing amount of Internet traffic flowing through those fiber cables is now armored against surveillance using SSL encryption. Google enabled HTTPS by default for Gmail in 2010, followed soon after by Microsoft’s Hotmail. Facebook enabled encryption by default in 2012. Yahoo now offers it as an option.

Unless, of course, the NSA can obtain an Internet company’s private SSL key. With a copy of that key, a government agency that intercepts the contents of encrypted communications has the technical ability to decrypt and peruse everything it acquires in transit, although actual policies may be more restrictive.

If the government obtains a company’s master encryption key, agents could decrypt the contents of communications intercepted through a wiretap or by invoking the potent surveillance authorities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Web encryption — which often appears in a browser with a HTTPS lock icon when enabled — uses a technique called SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer.

Top secret NSA documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden suggest an additional reason to ask for master encryption keys: they can aid bulk surveillance conducted through the spy agency’s fiber taps.

One of the leaked PRISM slides recommends that NSA analysts collect communications “upstream” of data centers operated by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. That procedure relies on a FISA order requiring backbone providers to aid in “collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”

Leaked NSA surveillance procedures, authorized by Attorney General Eric Holder, suggest that intercepted domestic communications are typically destroyed — unless they’re encrypted. If that’s the case, the procedures say, “retention of all communications that are enciphered” is permissible.

Heywood JabloemeComing form the same crew who poo-poos the usefullness of Metadata contrary to the resutls of an Acedemic paper from MIT - not surprising. You guys are the equivalent of the right-wing cliamte change deniers. Thought leaders fur-sur. Onward science ...

To sum up, America, the privacy protections you’re afforded are much weaker than you’re being led to believe, and when it comes to destroying communications that concern U.S. citizens, the NSA is either lying to the Senate about its ability to flag those communications, or else misleading the public about how reliably the communications of American citizens are destroyed.

On Thursday it was business as usual at Ikea. On Friday the results of an independent investigation by Ernst & Young revealed that in the 1980s political prisoners in the former East Germany provided some of the labor that helped Ikea keep its prices so low.

This shocking revelation is making news around the world, and Ikea is in damage control mode. According to a story in The New York Times, ‘The use of political prisoners as forced labor, even decades ago, is a publicity disaster for a company that with its familiar blue and yellow logo seems at times like a cultural ambassador for Sweden.’

‘We deeply regret that this could happen. The use of political prisoners in production has never been acceptable to the Ikea Group. At the time, we didn’t have today’s well-developed control system and obviously didn’t do enough to prevent such production conditions among our former GDR suppliers,’ says Jeanette Skielmose, sustainability manager at Ikea of Sweeden.

There are three reasons that every large global corporation teeters at the edge of a reputational cliff. First, employees, consumers, shareholders, and other stakeholders are holding corporations to higher and higher standards. Second, there’s a growing movement of socially conscious citizens, especially younger people, who are deeply concerned that too many people are still living in unacceptable social and economic conditions. And third, easier access to information and the ability to share information quickly means that inappropriate behavior can’t be hidden for long.

According to law enforcement agencies, the rising popularity of Internet chat services like Skype has made it difficult to eavesdrop on suspects’ communications. But now a California businessman is weighing in with what he claims is a revolutionary solution—a next-generation surveillance technology designed to covertly intercept online chats and video calls in real time.

Voice over IP chat software allows people to make phone calls over the Internet by converting analog audio signals into digital data packets. Because of the way the packets are sent over the Web, sometimes by a “peer-to-peer” connection, it can be complex and costly for law enforcement agencies to listen in on them. This has previously led some countries, like Ethiopia and Oman, to block VoIP services on “security” grounds. In the United States and Europe, too, VoIP has given authorities a headache. The FBI calls it the “going dark problem” and is pushing for new powers to force internet chat providers to build in secret backdoors to wiretap suspected criminals’ online communications.

In response, technology companies have rushed to develop new surveillance solutions. Dennis Chang, president of Sun Valley-based VOIP-Pal, obtained a series of patents related to online voice calls earlier this year. Among them is a “legal intercept” technology that Chang says “would allow government agencies to ‘silently record’ VoIP communications.”

With this technology, suspects whom authorities wanted to monitor could be identified through their username and subscriber data. They could also be found, according to the patent, by billing records that associate names and addresses with usernames, making not only calls but “any other data streams such as pure data and/or video or multimedia data” available for interception. Of course, savvy criminals—or citizens worried about privacy intrusions—could probably find a way to circumvent identification by using false subscriber data and by masking their IP address with anonymity tools. But the point is that Chang’s patent would make it much easier than it is currently for authorities to monitor VoIP calls, by fundamentally restructuring the basic architecture of how the calls themselves are routed over the Internet.

They’ve aimed their rescue efforts at fiscal nostrums that do nothing to address the truly urgent economic issues facing American workers and businesses today. They’ve confined the discussion of tax reform to tweaks that will leave virtually intact the most important tax break for the wealthy (the preferential treatment of investment income), while turning their gun sights on government programs that keep millions of Americans healthy and out of poverty (think Medicare and Social Security).

Make no mistake: The valiant budget negotiators at work in Congress and the White House are mapping out a plan for economic austerity under the guise of “getting our house in order.” This is despite blindingly obvious evidence that what’s needed in the U.S. today is the opposite — more stimulus to jump-start job creation, and more spending on infrastructure from roads and bridges to communications and electrical grids.

Do you doubt that? Then look at the paragon of post-crash austerity: Europe. Harsh budget cuts in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, along with austere fiscal regimes in France and Britain, have pushed the Eurozone back into recession.

Republicans around the country are responding to President Obama’s reelection in a variety of ways — among them: anger, depression, finger-pointing. But nobody had the same reaction as Eric Dondero, a former Ron Paul aide who blogs at libertarianrepublican.net. In a post yesterday, Dondero, reasoning that the only recourse to Obama’s victory is “outright revolt,” laid out the terms of the “personal boycott” against Democrats which he plans to maintain for the rest of his life and that he hopes his followers will as well. What does the boycott entail? Cutting all ties with Democratic family members, friends, and lovers; refusing to work for a Democratic boss; spitting on the ground when a Democrat talks to you; and possibly shitting on your Democratic neighbor’s lawn, among other things:

All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.
I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted ‘O’. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.
Do you work for someone who voted for Obama? Quit your job. Co-workers who voted for Obama. Simply don’t talk to them in the workplace, unless your boss instructs you too for work-related only purposes. Have clients who voted Democrat? Call them up this morning and tell them to take their business elsewhere.
Have a neighbor who votes for Obama? You could take a crap on their lawn. Then again, probably not a good idea since it would be technically illegal to do this. But you could have your dog take care of business. Not your fault if he just happens to choose that particular spot.

It’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature.

So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention. Those areas where your attention is focused assemble to form a set of experiences that shape and influence where you’ll direct future attention. But that attention is interrupted all the time by people, events, things, desires, boredom, weather, etc. and that process of interruption is, largely, contained to physical space because that is a natural gate on access.

Then there’s the phone. The “phone” part of the mobile phone is important not because of the voice communication it enables, but rather from the habit and etiquette that the ringing bell created in society and the direct access it grants to the caller. It’s the promise of instant communication at the cost of having attention interrupted and redirected. The key to unlocking that attention is a semi-random sequence of digits which you can give to someone else to indicate that the person now has permission to interrupt you and to access your attention directly.

Email works so well because it is another opportunity for access and people have formed a collective habit of actively directing attention toward their inboxes at regular intervals. We have all agreed to walk to our computers and check the new mail indicator and are generally addressable through a combination of a username and domain. It’s not as insistent as the phone, though, and provides just enough lag to enable some measure of control over granting access. Twitter and Facebook have feeds which abstract away both the To: and Subject: fields of email and represent two very different networks but are nonetheless an evolution of the habits email created. Facebook further improves the method of connection through friendship and the use of real names with the network itself providing necessary disambiguation.

Of all the instances in which graphic communication is necessary to transcend language barriers, the Olympic Games are, if not the most important, probably the most visible. We take the little icons of swimmers and sprinters as a given aspect of Olympic design, but the pictograms were a mid-20th Century invention—first employed, in fact, the last time London hosted the games, in 1948 (some pictographic gestures were made at the 1936 Berlin games, though their mark on international memory has been permitted to fade because of their association with Third Reich ideology).

The 1948 London pictograms were not a system of communication so much as a series of illustrations depicting each of the competitive sports, as well as the arts competition, which existed from 1912 to 1952 and included architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. In 1964, the Tokyo games took pictogram design to the next level by creating a complete system of typography, colors and symbols that would be applied across Olympic communications platforms.

In a paper on the history of Olympic design and national history, Jilly Traganou, an associate professor at The New School, writes:

Since Japan had not adopted the principles of the International Traﬃc Signs, introduced at the United Nations Geneva conference in 1949 and accepted by most European countries, the Olympics were regarded by graphic designers as an opportunity to establish a more uniﬁed and internationally legible symbolic language across the country. It was along these lines, searching for universally understood visual languages, that pictograms (ekotoba, in Japanese, a word used prior to the design of pictograms) were for the ﬁrst time designed for the Olympic Games, embodying at the same time [founder of the International Olympic Committee] Baron deCoubertinʼs aspirations of universalism…A major task of the Japanese design team of the 1960s was to de-traditionalize Japanese visual languages by subscribing to the abstract, non-iconic principles of the modern movement, found also to be more appropriate for expressing the new corporate identities of postwar Japan.

The Japanese pictogram system was conceived by a team of designers led by Katsumi Masaru and inspired in part by design language development that was taking place in Vienna, masterminded by Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. Neurath and Arntz are known for the creation of isotype, an early (and still completely current) infographic form.

A man who called 911 in Nashville recently was too ill to speak to the dispatcher. That could have been a life-threatening situation, says Duane Phillips, director of Emergency Communications Center in metro Nashville.

But because the man had registered with a new 911 database called Smart911 and detailed his health issues, the dispatcher knew what to do.

“Normally we handle that as an open line and send police to investigate, Phillips said. “Because he had registered with Smart911, we knew he had heart problems so we sent an ambulance and the police. It probably saved his life.”

Nashville is one of a growing number of cities and communities that have adopted the Smart911 system — a voluntary database that allows people to enter personal information, like medical conditions, number of children in a house and other data that gives dispatchers information that could prove critical when they send first-responders out on emergency calls.

Washington, D.C., last week became the most recent to adopt the system. This year, Arkansas became the first to adopt it statewide. It is now used in nearly 300 communities in 25 states, according to Todd Piett, chief product officer for Rave Mobile Safety, developers of Smart911

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